It was hot.
It ran down my scalp and my neck and into the collar of the jacket, and a long gasp went across the room like wind over wheat.
The cup came down on the table with a bang that rang off the plaque on the wall.
“Don’t come back,” said Hunter.
“Ever.”
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then I heard a chair scrape.
It was Mr. Alvarado.
He rose from the corner booth, eighty-two years old, shaking, with one hand on the table.
“Young man,” he said in a thin voice that carried to every corner of that room, “I have eaten in this restaurant for eleven years.”
“I do not know who that man is.”
“But I know who you are.”
“And I know what you are.”
Hunter looked around, annoyed.
He turned back, grabbed my collar in his fist, and hauled me half out of the chair.
